When Thursday’s class veered off into a discussion about art with political implications, I found myself wracking my memory for artists who promoted this kind of expressive propaganda. I realized that there are actually quite a few. This post will not be concerned with weighing the effectiveness of these endeavors. All I wish to do here is point out that there have been many (sometimes inadvertent) attempts in recent years to fuse the academies of art and politics.

First, let’s talk aural art – by that I mean music. We pointed out in class that there is no band that accurately captures the zeitgeist of the recent political turn this country has taken. While I agree with that observation as a generality, I think there are modern musicians who do concern themselves with some politics from time to time. Take Coldplay, for example. Their last album “Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends” was teeming with political themes. Delacroix’s “Liberty Leading the People,” the well-known illustration of the French July Revolution of 1830, graced the cover, while within the album itself, tracks like “Violet Hill” and “Death and All His Friends” carried unmistakable political implications. There are other examples from contemporary musicians, like the punk-rock mavens of Green Day, popular hip-hop artists Jay-Z and Kanye West, and the notorious John Mayer. These efforts are not confined to modern music. Sociopolitical commentaries have been surfacing in music for centuries. Just look at Mozart’s Don Giovanni – while it might be a stretch to say that the opera is predominantly politically charged, there are quite a few sociopolitical inferences (like the dichotomy between the upper and lower classes).

Political themes in visual art are even more ubiquitous. A mere cursory look at my favorite genre – photoconceptualism – will render a plethora of politically active photo-conceptualists. There’s Barbara Kruger and Martha Rosler, who in their respective “Untitled (Questions)” and “Bringing the War Home, House Beautiful” use visual means to question American foreign and domestic policy, among other political messages. There’s the notorious Viennese “Actionists” (more accurately, anarchists) of the sixties like Rudolf Schwarzkogler and Hermann Nitsch, who staged daring actions that they photographed. Their usage of frightening iconography was plainly meant to convey their dissatisfaction with the sociopolitical conventions of post-war Vienna (I’d rather not provide a link to these two, since the images are WAY too disturbing. Google at your own risk). Even artists with whom most people are familiar – like Andy Warhol and Jackson Pollock – could not resist incorporating some political undertones (click on their names to see examples). Perhaps most noteworthy is Banksy, the notorious graffiti artist who I’ve blogged about before. Not just some, but MOST of his work is political in nature.

Elsewhere in the arts, we have Alvin Ailey’s “Revelation,” which deals with themes of slavery and discrimination through the medium of dance and Wallace Shawn’s “The Designated Mourner” as an example of political theater. Architecture is perhaps in a league of its own, since most of the political controversy it generates is unintentional. In my Urban Studies class, we did a unit on the militarization of public space, where we pointed out that a lot of the city’s architecture is designed to keep “undesirables” out. The Frances Howard Goldwyn Library in Hollywood, California is the best illustration of this phenomenon – the library, which is supposed to be a public space like all public libraries, has been designed to look like a high-tech fortress. The assumption is that the library’s imposing presence will intimidate or discourage certain unwanted people from entering. And this is just one of many examples of using art and design to further a political agenda.

With so much political infringement on art, the obvious question is whether or not political messages are successfully conveyed through the artistic medium. I think the answer is yes, but I readily welcome a more thorough analysis on the issue. On second thought, maybe I’ll just blog about that next time…